Despite a ban on pseudo news and a requirement that all advertisements should be clearly labeled, news-like advertisements from government institutions or government-owned businesses that are vaguely labeled are still common, media reform activists said yesterday.
“Since pseudo news was banned in January, many government-owned businesses are now paying to get newspapers to publish promotional or propaganda articles labeled ‘advertorial features,’” Media Watch chairman Kuang Chung-hsiang (管中祥) told a news conference in Taipei. “But a majority of the public don’t know what ‘advertorials’ are and could still confuse such articles as real news reports.”
Citing the result of a poll conducted by Media Watch with more than 700 valid samples, Kuang said more than 90 percent of respondents said they didn’t know what an advertorial was and only 5.4 percent said they knew what it was.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
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“Government agencies or government-owned businesses should stop publishing advertorials in newspapers and correctly label such articles as advertisements, as required by the law,” he said.
Association of Taiwan Journalists chairman Lin Chau-yi (林朝億) agreed with Kuang.
He said that the Government Budget Act (預算法) stipulates that when government agencies or businesses with more than 50 percent of their funding coming from the government pay to publish information in the media, “the information must be labeled as ‘advertising’ and it must say who paid for it.”
Advertorials that fail to meet these requirements are unlawful and the accounting department that approved the budget, as well as the auditor who reviewed and approved the accounting report, would be breaking the law, he said.
The activists also showed newspaper clippings of advertorials from several Chinese-language newspapers.
On most of the clips, the word “advertorial” is written in fine print in a corner below the article.
“The labeling is not very obvious, and some do not have labels at all,” Lin said.
Environmentalists who attended the press conference voiced their worries that government-sponsored advertisement could kill room for public debate on some public issues.
PETROCHEMICALS
Wild at Heart Legal Defense Foundation executive secretary Wang Chia-chen (王佳真) said that amid debate on whether a petrochemical industrial park should be built along the coast of Changhua County, the Ministry of Economic Affairs ran advertisements in the country’s four major Chinese--language newspapers saying how inconvenient life would be without the petrochemical industry.
“We never said we’re opposed to the petrochemical industry. We’re just opposed to building oil refineries in an ecologically sensitive area and raising the question on whether the petrochemical industry should expand at this time,” Wang said. “But the economics ministry’s ‘threatening’ [message] to the public is killing the room for debate.”
The activists urged the government to follow the law and fulfill the commitments it has made.
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